| Abstract | The existence of strictly alphabetic representations of spoken language, of the kinds practiced by linguists, has sometimes been taken to mean that any speech signal may be described as a sequence of discrete sounds, and that a difference in the spelling of two utterances implies a dissimilarity, audible and “phonetic,” that is potentially of semantic significance. Sounds spelled alike are heard to be linguistically, and perhaps also phonetically, the same. With the advent of method of rapid spectrographic analysis some researchers have come to believe that speech cannot be analyzed into acoustically specifiable segments isomorphic with their alphabetic spellings. The linguist’s spelling of a speech signal, therefore, is not equivalent to an acoustic description of its linguistically relevant properties. |
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